Mbay is a small language spoken by approximately 100,000 people in the southern part of Chad. Over the period 1988-1990, the National Science Foundation supported research that resulted in the publication of a dictionary and grammar of this language. The Mbay CD project will build upon this work to produce a CD which contains all of the data from these published sources, but with an important addition: recordings of the actual language spoken by a native speaker of Mbay will also be included. With the addition of these recording, users will not only be able to see the data on the screen, but will also be able to hear the words and sample sentences, spoken by a native speaker, by simply clicking on the Mbay word or sentence. Grammatical information, photos, and other language information will also be made available. At a time when political upheavals are threatening so many languages in this region, the project will work towards the long-term preservation of this endangered language for future generations. In addition, the software developed for the project is likely to serve as a valuable format for the preservation of other endangered languages.
